Bad Faith Insurance Claims in Florida

The core of bad faith is an insurer putting its own money ahead of its duties: refusing a reasonable chance to settle within limits, dragging out a claim it knows it owes, lowballing with information it knows is false, or failing to defend its insured properly.

HB 837 raised the bar for proving it. Under the amended § 624.155, mere negligence alone is insufficient to constitute bad faith.^[1] A sloppy adjuster or a slow file no longer makes the case. The conduct has to rise beyond carelessness, to a knowing or reckless disregard of the insurer's obligations, proven through the claim file, the correspondence, and the timeline.

The reform also armed insurers with a defense aimed at claimants: the injured person and their lawyer now owe a duty of good faith in furnishing information, making demands, setting deadlines, and attempting settlement. A demand designed to be impossible, a deadline built for failure, or withheld records can reduce the bad faith damages a jury awards. The set-up game is dead. What survives is the honest, documented, reasonable demand that the insurer still refuses.

Two deadlines now shape every potential bad faith case, one for each side.

The insurer's 90-day safe harbor. An insurer that tenders the lesser of the policy limits or the amount demanded within 90 days of receiving actual notice of the claim, with enough evidence to evaluate it, cannot be sued for bad faith on that claim. The tender window rewards early, complete documentation from the victim's side: the sooner the insurer has everything it needs, the sooner its 90 days start running against a real decision.

The claimant's 60-day cure notice. Before most statutory bad faith suits, a civil remedy notice must be filed with the state and served on the insurer, spelling out the violation. The insurer then has 60 days to cure by paying the damages or correcting the violation. A cured violation ends the claim, and a defective notice can end it too, which is why the notice is drafted like a pleading, not a form.

Between the two clocks sits the practical lesson: bad faith cases are built during the underlying injury claim, in the demand package, the deadlines, and the paper trail, months before anyone files anything.

Bad faith is the exception to the hardest rule in injury law: that recovery stops at the policy limits.

When a jury returns a verdict above the limits after the insurer wrongly refused to settle, a successful bad faith claim makes the insurer pay the excess judgment, the whole verdict, not the policy cap its insured bought. Recoverable damages run to the foreseeable consequences of the violation, plus court costs and attorney fees. Punitive damages are possible where the misconduct reflects a general business practice done willfully or with reckless disregard.

In a state where drivers legally carry no bodily injury coverage at all, and minimum policies are thin, that leverage matters most in serious cases. It polices the gap between what insurers owe and what they hope to pay, and every adjuster who handles a claim professionally is responding to the existence of this remedy.

Third-party bad faith is the classic shape. The at-fault driver's insurer refuses a within-limits settlement of your claim, the case goes to verdict above the limits, and the insured driver is left personally exposed. The bad faith claim then pursues the insurer for the excess, often through an assignment of the insured's rights. The insurer gambled with its own customer's finances and lost.

First-party bad faith runs against your own carrier, most often in uninsured motorist claims, where Florida's coverage landscape sends so many serious cases. A UM insurer that stonewalls, underpays, or games its own claim process faces the same statutory remedy. Given that roughly one in five Florida drivers carries no insurance, the UM claim mishandled in bad faith is a recurring story, and our page on uninsured driver claims in Florida explains how those claims are supposed to work.

Either shape begins the same way: an underlying claim handled with documented professionalism on the victim's side, so the insurer's conduct stands alone in the file. That is not luck. It is how our Florida car accident lawyers run every serious claim from day one.